IBSS: The Impact of Foreign Languages on Problem Solving: An Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Society

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Communication in a foreign language has been shown to strongly affect decision making. As communication and transportation technologies have increasingly "globalized" the world, more people communicate with one another using languages other than their native language, whether in business, politics, or casually. This interdisciplinary research project will use a variety of methods to evaluate the consequences of using a foreign language on individuals and society in a range of different domains. The investigators will assess the effects of foreign languages on strategic risk taking, auction market efficiency, public opinion surveys, creative problem solving, scientific discovery, invention, and entrepreneurship. The project will enhance basic understanding of the ways that language changes thought and behavior by providing new insights into the pervasive impact of language on intellectual activity, including mechanisms of mind, brain, and social institutions. As such, the project will make intellectual contributions across a range of the disciplines, including psychology, economics, political science, and sociology. The project also will have far-reaching social implications. For example, given that about one-half of the internal medicine residents in U.S. hospitals are foreign-born, health-care organizations can more precisely anticipate risk-taking trends among physicians depending on whether or not they use a foreign language professionally. Intelligence communities, diplomats, and businesses will be able to apply project findings strategically in negotiation and problem solving situations with foreign entities. The project also will help address central societal issues by providing new perspectives with which to assess the value of immigration and the innovation that accompanies it. With respect to education, the project will provide tools to increase the effectiveness of education and training for bilingual immigrant students and to better anticipate the benefits of bilingual education on performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.This project will focus on the ways through which language changes thought and behavior. Theories of individual and institutional behavior tend to be based strictly within disciplines and typically ignore the role of language. This project will transform these approaches by broaching the divide between individual decision makers and institutional behavior. The investigators will employ a novel interdisciplinary approach that involves collaboration among researchers from psychology, economics, sociology, and political science. They will use experimental methods and surveys to collect behavioral, physiological, and brain activity measures, comparing tasks performed in native and foreign languages. They also will engage in a large-scale, computational investigation of millions of publications and patents to evaluate the consequences of using a foreign language on innovations in science and business. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.